Fermented Hot Sauce

Using this recipe, for the last week I've been fermenting various red and yellow peppers along with carrots, garlic and shallots. Today I ran it all through not just one but two blenders (the first one is the kind in which you can unscrew the bottom with the blades and this happened accidentally, so a lot of my sauce got spilled onto the counter). Ultimately I got one cute bottle full and one squeeze bottle full. It's rather mild, likely because I didn't add too many seeds and because the peppers themselves were milder. Either way, now we have some chili sauce and a way to use up all those hot peppers!

Cornichons and Gherkins

This morning, I made Sweet Gherkins using the recipe on page 306 of Preserving Summer's Bounty. It called for honey, which might just be the first time I've ever canned anything with honey in it. Basically, after soaking the little cucumbers overnight in ice water, I cooked them in a mixture of cider vinegar, turmeric, pickling spices, cinnamon and celery seeds. To this mixture, 2 cups of honey are added. That's a lot of honey. I used up the local honey I'd bought for the bees and then added in some more *gasp* store-bought organic honey. The recipe says it makes 10-11 pints, but I only got 4 and a half, so I don't know what's going on there.

Then, after the other cucumbers had sat in salt for a day, they were ready to become cornichons. This recipe comes from page 90 of The Joy of Pickling. These cornichons are pickled but not canned. After rinsing and drying the cucumbers, they are packed into a quart jar with 4 shallots, 2 dried chilies, 1 bay leaf, 10 peppercorns, and 2 sprigs of fresh tarragon. Then the jar is filled with white wine vinegar. I finished my bottle of white wine vinegar so had to top off the jar with some tarragon vinegar instead. Now it sits on the shelf for a month before eating them. With paté.

Potato Leekie Lambie Sheepie Soup

There I was, sitting on a rock at the stables, letting the horse I'd just showered dry and graze in the sun, and I looked down and found a HUGE patch of sheep sorrel!  Yum!

A quick search with my iPhone suggested that I could make a potato sorrel soup and, oh, look!  I have leeks and shallots and garlic from the farm and oh, hey, here's some lamb's quarters instead of spinach!  I can make this soup, from one of the White House chefs!  Only with all farm share or foraged ingredients!  (Well, except for the butter and the spices...)

I picked a big bunch of sheep sorrel and about a cup, maybe a little less, of lamb's quarters leaves.  I grabbed a sprig of what I thought was thyme but turned out to be oregano, so I ended up not using it.  I followed the recipe otherwise exactly and created a yummy soup which I will take in a thermos to work tonight.  

Farmed, Foraged, Homegrown and Homemade

After my pasta-making extravaganza this morning, I spent all afternoon wondering what sort of sauce I should serve the raviolis with.  I mean, here are these wonderfully fresh pumpkin-sage raviolis.  A brown butter and sage sauce might be too much sage, right?

As I pondered this, I remembered that I had foraged a few cranberries in Maine last week.  So I did a little searching and came up with this sauce, paired with a pumpkin risotto.  I cut the recipe in half and, since I didn't have cranberry juice, just used water.  Here's my version:

1/6 cup water

1/2 cup frozen wild cranberries (foraged)

1/2 T. dijon mustard

1 shallot (small; farm)

2 T. sugar

4 T. brown butter

The first 5 ingredients were pureed in the blender and then the brown butter was added with the blender on low.  I set this aside while I cooked the raviolis and the rest of the homemade spaghetti.  In the pan in which I'd browned the butter I cooked all the little green beans from my bean plant.

The bean plant was brought to me at the end of kindergarten by my 6 year old who was excited last week to see that it was huge and had lots of little beans on it.  I think they were supposed to be kidney beans, but as they were all so tiny, I figured we could just eat them.  Once they were sauteed, I put them on the ravioli and topped it all with the cranberry sauce and a sprig of sage from the garden.  Wow.

The Canning Before The Storm

Perhaps you've heard, there's a hurricane on its way to the northeastern U.S.  And I have to work!  I plan to work this evening and then stay up there through the storm and work my shift and then go home when it's all over.  While I am not psyched about leaving the car outside in the hospital parking lot, I am more not psyched about driving in 60+ mph winds.  


Anyhow, I wanted to finish up the farm share canning projects I had going on so I could feel like I wasn't just cooling my heels tomorrow while I'm stuck at work.  So this morning I made pickled beets.  There were more than a few rogue golden beets in my stockpile of beets - they look ghostly in the jars of dark purple.  There are 4 quarts of pickled beets in this batch and I plan to give at least 2 of those jars to my mother-in-law.  One in the care package I'm preparing, and the rest later when they come to visit again.  She loves them and I'm happy to oblige.


Then I used up all the tomatoes from my garden which were ripe (have to get them all off the vines before the wind does), plus the farm share tomatoes, peppers, jalapenos, and scallions to make this salsa.  It is really, really good.  I had exactly 3 quarts of tomatoes once I chopped them all up.  I used up all the farm share peppers and jalapenos and added 1 store-bought green pepper.  I used my scallions and a single store-bought onion and then rounded out the 3 cups of onion by using 4 cloves of farm share garlic and 2 shallots.  It made 6.5 pints of salsa.


This is what's left of the farm share from Thursday:
1 heads of lettuce

10 leaves of kale

1.5 pounds of potatoes

1 cucumbers

1 heads of garlic

1 large shallots

2 eggplant

3 small pattypan squashes

2 spaghetti squashes


I think I've done pretty well, then, don't you?


And my thoughts are with all of you in the Carolinas & vicinity.  Stay safe!